Installation

Disk

I installed from the live CD 2008.0 in hopes that the wireless card would work. It didn't, even after I loaded the firmware. I did notice that both the b43xx and b43 modules were loaded, so maybe they were conflicting. Not sure.

BIOS

Acer Extensa 4620 BIOS updates are available here. Before I installed Gentoo, I booted into the pre-installed Widoze Vista and updated the bios to the most current release. I originally attempted to hand roll a FreeDOS bootable CD with the driver updates on it but I did something wrong. The CD would boot (sort of), say "FreeDOS" and just hang there.

CPU

Graphics

Wireless

Sound (hda-intel card)

Getting sound playback to work was easy, it just worked. Getting the built in mic to work in skype was not intuitive. Follow these steps to get the built in mic working perfectly with skype. (I have not tried other applications, but they may work after this too)

First make sure your kernel is properly configured. All sound goodies built as modules (kernel section).

run alsamixer press f5 to show all controls Set MASTER to your loudness pref Set PCM to 100 Line In to 0 Mic Boost to 0 Capture to 84 Digital to 0 Input Source to Front Mic (you would think 'internal mic' would be the built in one, but it's NOT!) Internal to 50 press esc to exit

as root do alsactl store

Start Skype set Options --> Sound Devices --> Sound In to HDA Intel (hw:Intel,0) uncheck 'Allow Skype to adjust mixer levels' Click Apply and you should be good to go!

Webcam

Using linux-uvc the webcam is correctly identified as Acer CrystalEye webcam (064e:a101).